There's gold in those hills – white gold – and making the most of it has become serious business. MATT PHILP reports on the changing face of the ski industry.

The morning has clagged-in, and the lowering murk is about to swallow the last of the field's three chairlifts, but at Mount Hutt's base building everything is running like the typical well-oiled machine.

Staff are crisply professional. The first-floor administration office is noisy with purposeful comings and goings, and somewhere below, a professional-development seminar is under way.

You would struggle to find a sifty-eyed liftie of the old school anywhere.

This is the new-look modern snow business and Dave Wilson, ski area manager for Hutt, is its genial face.

A former accountant and group financial manager, Wilson has found the perfect industry in which to hone his corporate skills while indulging his longtime love of the mountains.

Not that his background precludes him from reeling off the occasional ski-bum aphorism.

"It's not that I don't like summer," he says, quoting some snow fiend he once overheard in a lift queue, "I just think it's overrated."

It's an understandable position given the lucrative winter of 2006, when bountiful June snows and a disastrous scenario across the Tasman combined to sell a record 1.4 million lift passes at our big commercial fields.

So far this season, there has been nothing to rival last year's prodigious early snow dumps, but with Niwa forecasting average to decent falls, field operators are confident of banking plenty more white gold.

Already, travel agents and accommodation providers are reporting that Australian bookings in particular are well up on previous years, while Wilson says that Hutt has sold a record number of season passes.

Some of it is bound to be flow-on from last season, but the early bookings are probably also evidence that the huge sum spent by Mount Hutt's owners over the last few years is beginning to pay dividends.

In a business that eats money, where most equipment has to be imported either from Europe or North America, Southern Alpine Recreation Limited (Sarl) has shelled out $30 million in five years, some of it upgrading Coronet Peak and the Remarkables at Queenstown, but a sizeable chunk on transforming Mount Hutt.

Wilson says the investment was essential to meet the rising expectations of both local and overseas skiers.

The reality of today's snow business is that if you don't build it, groom it and tie it in a bow, they won't come.

As befits a company of southern businessmen, however, money wasn't just flung at the slopes.

"We did a lot of analysis on the numbers coming down the mountain, the capacity we needed, the type of lifts we wanted and our market mix – we've got a high number of advanced skiers and riders, so there's an expectation we will cater for them. We spent a year working through that project."

The result was that Hutt's base building and guest facilities were improved and expanded, and the mountain "reconfigured" in line with modern snow-sport trends.

All seven surface lifts were uprooted and a state- of-the-art, high-speed six-person chairlift and a beginners "magic carpet" installed in their place, along with a terrain park for boarders and twin-tip skiers, and several new tracks to access the ridgelines.

A hefty slice of the investment was spent on boosting snowmaking capacity – as much as anything to safeguard Hutt's future.

For years, Hutt got by on its T-bars and platter lifts, says Wilson. Fine in their day, "but I think we were losing a bit of the international market, especially out of Australia".

The changes, he says, have redefined Hutt as a genuine international field and that message is now getting out.

"People are saying it is a completely different mountain."

The same massive investment drive is being replicated throughout the industry. Treble Cone Investments, which paid Tourism Holdings $4m for the Wanaka field back in 2002, has recently ploughed close to that same amount into upgrading lifts and groomers, improving facilities and opening new runs into the back-country to create a European-style ski trail.

The company's strategy is seemingly to broaden Treble Cone's appeal beyond its traditional base of hardcore skiers and create some off-season attractions.

Citing research that shows overseas visitors are deterred by the prospect of having to drive up the mountain, it has applied to build a multimillion-dollar gondola capable of ferrying 2000 people an hour from the base of the access road to the field.

Meanwhile, the big player in the North Island, Ruapehu Alpine Lifts, has risen from the ashes of volcanic eruptions during the mid-1990s and subsequent poor seasons to spend $20m this summer on a range of improvements, including a top-end, high- speed six-seater and trebling of snowmaking guns at Turoa.

The snow guns are now essential for any commercial field's operation, says Miles Davidson, of industry group, the Ski Areas Association. It's a tenuous business, weather- dependent and with just a four-month period in which to earn revenue, but those $35,000 snow guns have added a measure of stability.

"Snowmaking has been a saviour to this industry – not just here but worldwide," he says. "It means you can guarantee a quality product and open up sections of the mountain that otherwise couldn't be opened."

In fact, adds Hutt's Dave Wilson: "We wouldn't be open right now without snowmaking."

A certain amount of this flurry of investment is motivated by the need to cater to the relatively new snowboarder market and its demands for more open spaces, terrain parks, half-pipes and jumps. But the redevelopments are also aimed at shoring up the growing appeal of a New Zealand ski holiday among Australians, who accounted for half of the 101,000 international skiers and boarders on New Zealand slopes in 2006.

"The infrastructure in the South Island in particular is dependent on the Australians," says Davidson.

Cheap airfares and more direct flights from Australian cities have been a boon.

And the snow industry has also improved its pitch across the Ditch, most recently collaborating with Tourism New Zealand on an Australia- wide television and print campaign.

James Urquhart, Southern Alpine's Mount Hutt-based sales and marketing co-ordinator, says it can be a tougher sell for the Canterbury fields, against the glamour and name recognition of Queenstown.

"Australian wholesalers and travel agents sell Queenstown because it's easy."

Mount Hutt, in some respects, he says, is in rivalry with its Southern Alpine stablemates. But the real competition is the Aussie ski industry, as well as cheap flights to the Pacific Islands and various other calls on the disposable dollar.

James Urquhart, from Mount Hutt, says the industry meets that challenge by presenting a united front when marketing overseas.

"The approach we've taken is 'let's just try to get them over here first before we fight over them'."

If that all sounds terribly corporate and organised, then that's the reality. Miles Davidson says that the days of seat-of-the-pants field management and a "she'll-be-right" take on customer service are consigned to folklore.

"There is so much money being invested in these ski areas now, especially by the leaders. The guys at the top these days are business managers; they're reporting to boards and shareholders, just like any company CEO."

James Coddington, newly appointed chief executive of Southern Alpine, is typical of the new breed. Coddington was once a ski instructor, but it was his experience at Australasia's largest veterinary business that swung the appointment.

"The board was clear that they wanted business acumen ahead of a ski-industry background," he says.

Coddington has arrived as part of a major management shake-up that has fuelled speculation Southern Alpine plans to expand into areas such as accommodation.

The new boss, however, stresses that changes at the top are simply an acknowledgement of the evolution of the company.

"Southern Alpine is a huge company now. We hire 1100 employees. So you need a certain amount of professionalism and corporatism."

According to the most recent economic-impact study, that big business has big spinoffs.

The 2005 study by the New Zealand Tourism Research Institute concluded that visitors to the Southern Lakes skifields alone contributed $182m to the national economy – the figure outdid that year's Lions rugby tour – plus tens of millions in indirect benefits such as regional employment.

"It's quite a responsibility," says Coddington.

What's been lost? Yuli Dinsenbacher, into his 25th season managing the Porters Ski Area, says inevitably some of the colour – what he calls the "pioneer spirit" – of the snow business has gone.

But Dinsenbacher isn't mourning. The consortium of investors who last year bought Porters has already spent $1.5m on a groomer and cafe, new lifts and snow guns, and more investment is promised.

When Dinsenbacher arrived at the field it had rope tows; now, there are plans to replace T-bars with a chairlift within the next two seasons.

"Porters has always been undercapitalised. People have always seen its potential but never had the funds. And it has been hard to invest – it just takes one bad season and you spend the next two or three seasons catching up.

"Until recently we've had pretty basic facilities, but you just can't sell that to tourists any more," he says.

"The only way to survive is to upgrade and get more people up the mountain, and that takes a punt."

However, the snow business, is changing. "Wages have gone up. We paid peanuts in the industry until a few years ago, but now staff are on the same level as people in town, and we can ask for performance."

The downside is that all the money being spent has to get passed on in the form of higher priced lift passes.

"People say that skiing is too expensive, that it is not the sport it used to be, one that everybody could afford. But we're getting different people; the snowboarders come from a surfing and skateboarding side. It adds colour."